7th
The Great Switcheroo
Taking Care of Your Parents
Twice, I’ve lost control of a car on a slick road and spun 180 degrees to face the traffic behind me. Once was on the highway.
On one transatlantic flight, I experienced turbulence so strong the aeronautical engineer next to me crushed my hand in hers and I quietly resigned myself to death.
Still, nothing has scared me as much as the role reversal of parent and child, a reality of life I previewed two nights ago when my mom slipped on our wood floor and broke her wrist.
The pain was several times more excrutiating than when she broke her other wrist because this time, instead of fracturing her arm slightly above it, she broke the wrist itself in two places. She was moaning and crying, but every once in a while she would make a sound that seemed to come from somewhere below where we’re human and groan something awful like an animal. Her mind was overloaded; she was in shock, but it seemed to be doing more to arrest her inhibitors than numb the pain.
She fell around 23:30 Monday night and we spent the next few hours in an emergency facility that had opened across the street from our neighborhood only three days before. My dad and I sat in her room while a doctor gave her some kind of pethidine shot and reduced the angulation in one of her major wrist bones by bending her hand downward as hard as it seemed he could. Only forty minutes prior, the slightest bump in the road sent searing pain charging through her arm and body, and now a young doctor she kept calling “Skippy” (she was also on codine) was using some kind of judo move on her to bend her bone. It looked bad.
All this is to say that my mom hasn’t reverted to a child, but she is on painkillers and unable to drive or use her dominant hand, so she needs a lot of help. It seems to be a lot worse than the last time she broke a wrist, and it’s the closest I’ve come to having a dependent parent.
Of course, I don’t really have a dependent parent. My Mom’s a sharp and capable lady, and when she recovers from this, she’ll go back to teaching college courses and throwing parties and playing guitar like normal.
She’ll also go back to taking care of her ailing brother, just as she did, mostly alone, for both of their parents until they died. Any real understanding I have of the role reversal of parent and child comes from seeing her struggle through it twice. The predictable burdens of time and effort are magnified by the emotional stress of watching the primary source of nurturing and nourishment in your life suddenly falter, unable to take care of him or herself.
If you’re lucky, you grow up knowing your mom or dad as the most dependable and stable natural resources on the planet. Then one day —and I’m not saying this day has come for me— they aren’t getting around as easily anymore and have trouble remembering things. Before you know it, they’re not able to take care of you anymore. And as if the trials of mature independence weren’t harrowing enough, they’ll need you to take care of them.
My mom fell seconds before I came in the door the other night. When I walked into the kitchen and saw my dad holding her by the hips and guiding her into a chair, and her moaning and repeating how badly it hurt, I had this horrific epiphany about how we start and end this life as babies, and how unprepared I am to care for them.
